Before I bore you with what could be more lengthy stories of my daily accounts on the incredible experience and amazing journey at the conference, I thought I’d sum up the rest and put them altogether on this final account.
After that journey in Paul Dallaghan’s class, which had me thrown back with all the sensible new information about the Ashtanga system, I continued the journey and entered Jason Crandell’s “Releasing the Spine with Sidebends, Twists and Forward Bends” workshop. Having learned from previous lessons that expectations would just ruin and disappoint you, I came into Jason’s class without any and psyched myself to take everything in and allowed my body to analyze and experience it myself. The discussion and changing of notes I had with my student, Karin who like me, blessed and fortunate to be at the conference, confirmed the greatness and beauty of Jason’s classes as our notes were to be the same!
The first thing Jason did when he came on stage was, he addressed the class in reminding us not to over power in coming into a posture, not stretching the hamstrings, not jamming the sides and not crunching the belly but everything was to be done with the sense of awareness towards the spine. In fact, he urged us to do that in everything we do because the spine affects everything we do and everything we do affects the spine. He also told us that advance postures does not impress him so before we come to an advance posture, check on the intention first. If ego is involve, then best not to do it.
His way of lengthening the sides, lifting the diaphragm to open the ribcage, opens the heart in order to feel long and spacious in the spine. And that space will keep us open in our minds and receptive in our thoughts for us to go further in our journeys. He prevented us from going further than we should at the present because he wanted us to feel what was happening right here and now and just be happy with the present moment.
Many times when we practice difficult postures, we have this tendency to push and think that if we were to bend a little further, to twist a little tighter, to fold a little deeper, we would reach the final and perfect posture. Those actions represent our own demons that we need to battle with. And the way many of us do is by over stretching ourselves to a point of losing our breath, which is the only thing that protects us from harm other than our awareness. It’s almost like taking off our battle-suits and going naked against our enemies. So we need to have our breath and awareness always close to our minds before we do everything in our lives. With that, Jason closed the class with a soothing chant of OM to draw everyone back to their intention. What a beautiful class that was. The passion and dedication showed in every single thing he said.
I know I said at the top I want to make this ONE final account? But after writing on it, I figured that we could use a moment to assimilate all that is written and sink it all down to our system and make sense of it through our practice. Enjoy the new information and have a wonderful practice. Stay tune for the rest of the amazing notes coming up soon…
Next.. Sharath Rangaswamy – Ashtanga Led Primary Series (Where everything applies…)
I did not write any thing about Jason Crandell's class in my blog post as I could not find a way to describe his class in the way which you have done so beautifully here. I found his Healing with the Breath to be the best class I attended at the conference...:)
ReplyDeleteKarin